I told my daughter, the first time she fell in love, not to hold it too close. Think of yourself in a warm, summer pool, I told her, concentric circles rippling all around you. Golden beams of sunlight flooding your hair, striking your face. Inhale it. Breathe it. It will not leave you. If you place sunlight in your palms, it will turn to shadow. If you put fireflies in a jar, they will die. But if you love with wings on, you will always feel the exhilaration of being suspended in flight.

There are some things that a woman knows that she cannot tell even her family. It is part intuition and part self-preservation.

I often wonder if it’s the curse of old age, to feel young in your heart while your body betrays you.

You are too young to understand, solange, but there are many different types of love in this world. There are lovers of the flesh, lovers of the mind, and lovers sustained by family.:.

A woman who loves books has a dreamer’s soul, with each story she has read woven into her own.

Like poetry that is recited but never written down, more powerful because it is held solely in the mind.

The mind, the heart, the womb. Those three are all threaded in a sacred dance. A woman’s pelvis is like an hourglass with the capacity to tell time. It both creates and shelters life. When a mother’s diet in insufficient, nutrients are pulled from her own teeth and bone. Women are built to be selfless.

In my old age, I have come to believe that love is not a noun but a verb. An action. Like water, it flows to it’s own current.

There was a lightness to the material that she loved but that also made her feel vulnerable, and she wondered which was more dangerous – the transparency of a fabric or of the soul?

In my old age, I have come to believe that love is not a noun but a verb. An action. Like water, it flows to its own current. If you were to corner it in a dam, true love is so bountiful it would flow over. Even in separation, even in death, it moves and changes. It lives within memory, in the haunting of a touch, the transience of a smell, or the nuance of a sigh. It seeks to leave a trace like a fossil in the sand, a leaf burning into baking asphalt.